MiniMax M3 puts frontier coding, long context and multimodal into one open model

MiniMax has published M3, which it describes as "the first open-weight model with three frontier capabilities": frontier-level coding and agent work, a 1 million token context window and native multimodal understanding.

MiniMax says M3 scored 37.1 on the benchmark it cites, ranking third behind Opus 4.7 (42.4) and GPT-5.5 (39.3). Those are the company's own figures. It says the weights will be fully open-sourced on Hugging Face and GitHub.

It's already being wired into other tools: GitLab 19.4 added M3, alongside Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3, as a hosted open-weight option.

Coverage is still thin, so treat the claims as early.

Why it matters

Long context, agentic coding and multimodal understanding together have been a closed-frontier combination until now. If M3 holds up, it's another capable model you can run, or soon own, without asking anyone's permission.